Old favourites, new techniques ... nice!

 

Old favourite characters from soooo long ago, I'd actually forgotten about them. This was a nice little romantic fantasy back in 2010 (!) ... and I decided to use some old, old renders to test out some new theories. I've wanted to paint for a long time now. Not render. Paint. What you see here is 50% ancient raytrace, 50% painting -- and when you upscale an old, old render, boy, do you have to do some painting. They pixelize badly ... which gives you a project, and opens the door to a whole lot of painting. This was all done in Photoshop, for the sheer convenience of it. Not saying it couldn't have been done in Krita, but the truth is, it's rather a long time since I've played in Krita: the interface isn't as familiar as it used to be, and I'm way too tired to faff about. But -- yay -- everything worked! Now I can't wait to do more! Oh, yes. And speaking of painting --

That was an interesting project, and I'll leave it to you to figure out what was painted, what began as a transparent .png, which bit started life as a photograph, etc.. It's a combination of all three, and/but nothing was used in its original form -- which is why it looks seamless when it puzzled together.

This one, though, is a painting, pure and simple. From scratch. Started with a photo, which I took at Lyndoch Hill a couple of years ago ... did a sketch from it ... painted. Musk Lorikeet ... nice ... and this is the first time I have managed to hand-paint feathers that actually look like feathers! Every time I've tried, previously, I've got fur, not feathers, LOL. I knew I'd figure it out but -- dang, it took about five goes to get it. Ha!

So -- all experiments turned up positive results, and now I can't wait to paint! 

Adventures in digital painting, at any rate ... and a bit of "hybrid" SF...

Progress report of sorts... digital painting progresses nicely: suffice to say, I'm learning a lot. It's fantastic that this version of Krita passes files cleanly back and forth between its own file format and Photoshop -- means I can paint in both, at whim. 

And the experiment to see if we can use AI to generate picture elements for recompositing works, at least up to a point. The SF piece, here is a digital painting till you get to the robot. Duh. The robot was generated as an element by "Dream by Wombo," which is Ma Google's freebie engine. I was able to get a usable robot to use as a picture element, and didn't have to pay forty bucks for a prop! Because, with the best will in the world, I own two robot props, and you've seen them so often, in so many settings and combinations ... meh. So ... okay. AI has its uses in the short term; namely, to save me beaucoup bucks when I need to get an image without a prop. Argh.

Knowing that I need to do this, I am therefore looking at just about every option out there, before I tell my hubby which one I'd like the year's subscription to, for my birthday. So far, I've looked at Lexica, Wombo, Dreamlike Art, and Playground ... Lexica is the best; Wombo is terrifically hit and miss, but it beats the others hands down. Dreamlike should be called Nightmarelike, because it distorts everything and everybody into grotesqueness. I asked it for "a beautiful young Irish girl with long red hair," and it gave me a picture that looked like a still from a horror movie --

Nope. Let's go back to painting! So I, uh, did. These are a blend of Krita and Photoshop, with bits and bobs generated by some computer to save me bucks. 

We're about to pack up for a few days' trip to the Limestone Coast, and when I get back ... I'm going to start up DAZ again, for the first time in over a year. What's more, I'm going back to raytracing for a while, to get canvases on which to paint. Let's see what we can do here! 

Adventures in Krita, and explorations into AI. Gasp!

So ... where have I been for so long? Short version: 2022 "did a number" on me, and although I've started to make the journey back to health and strength, there's a (very) long way to go yet. For the longest time, I wasn't able to do anything much of anything. Then, on top of everything else I got Covid, and took months to throw it off -- the truth is, it's six months later, and I still haven't recovered a hundred percent...

In that time, art and writing have been next to impossible. I think I've written four short stories in the last year; and four items have been published, or are about to be (I just posted to my writing blog, bringing that up to date with scribbling and publishing) ... but writing new stuff? Painting? Rendering? That's been too much to even contemplate, till these last few weeks. Then...

Couple of things: I've gotten my feet wet with Krita. Full-on painting. Soooo much to learn, before I start doing exotic young hunks, (nudge wink) so I might as well learn on cats and owls and flutterflies, right? Krita is a LOT of fun. If you have any interest, it's open source, free forever, and looks (to me) to be just about the equal of things like Corel Paint, perhaps not quite on the same level with Rebelle ... but these progs are prohibitively expensive, while Krita is ... well, it's free. It's Krita.org, as far as I know, not dot-com.

The great news is, the Huion tablet is on and working, and is fan-flipping-tastic. It's making it possible for me to actually sketch and doodle. The squirrel pen and ink image was my first ever foray into the program, and it really is pen and ink. The owl was my first full-on true painting. I need to buy some extra brushes -- acrylic brushes, oil brushes, watercolour brushes, textures. Very soon, we'll be off to the races.

And just as I discover this, along comes the wonderful world of AI. Well, now. The truth is, since  don't have much of a cash flow, DAZ is a bit too expensive for me. All I can do is work with the existing props and sets and costumes, and one has to say, there's only so many ways you can rearrange them before you start to recognise literally every element of every picture. But with AI, it's free, incredibly fast, and amazingly vivid. 

The Chris Foss style heavy industrial spaceship image took minutes. Seriously. Argh. Urgh. You want stuff like this? Seconds, and there is is...

I do believe I have just heard the death knell for many, many forms of art. Unless DAZ can make its product more affordable AND easier to render on systems which real people (not industry pros, or companies chucking around tonnes of money) can afford, more and more people will drift away to AI. In fact, I'm heading in that direction, as well as long, slow, laborious painting in Krita. But I do want to be painting those exotic young hunks, and you do have to start somewhere, so ... here we go. Starting. 

A boy and his horse

This one is a combination of so many elements. The guy is Genesis 8, with a face and body form designed my me, and he's wearing the Dae skinmap, with the venous map turned on. So far, so good. Now, the horse ... I don't (yet) have the HiveWire horse, but the Millennium Horse is rendering up quite well, and it's also compatible enough with Studio 4 that you can pose it along with a Genesis 8 figure, and it looks okay, except for the mane and tail, which are (not to put too fine a point on it) crap. But wait, there's more -- 

Having rendered the horse with the mane and tail turned OFF, the next step is to paint the mane in. Now, I would love to tell you I hand painted this from scratch, but it's be a barefaced lie (and you know me better than that, LOL. No, no, this is the old CWRW Manes and Tails Pack Volume 1. which is 2D and manipulable in Photoshop, or Krita, or Affinity Photo (and since I can no longer use Photoshop, I did this pic in both Krita and Affinity, bouncing the image back and forth via the Windows clipboard, since neither program, on its own, has the functionality to do what I need. Ack).

The effect is quite nice, though nowhere near photographic. We'll shoot for photographic later, when/if we upgrade to the HiveWire Horse. For the moment, I'm happy to work with the old Manes and Tails packs by CWRW; if nothing else, they give be fantastic practice at using the new paint programs. I've already learned a lot. I was hunting around for the "skew" controls, and couldn't find them ... found out that this has been replaced by something immeasurably better: the Mesh Warp Tool. Woooow. Okay, so there's one big thing I've learned LOL ... and I'm happy enough using CWRW's packs of 2D add-ons, I might even treat myself to Manes and Tales 2 and 3, and perhaps even the poses and some new skinmaps for the old horse! If you're interested, they're at Renderosity; just get into the marketplace and search on "CWRW." The thing I like most about the Millennium Horse is, it still renders well in Iray, yet it's so low-poly, it renders fast. Meanwhile --

-- DAZ has upgraded to the Horse 2, which actually renders up much better than the MilHorse. But it's expensive ... As in, forty bucks for the figure, and not much in the way of skinmaps and morphs. If you want to morph this guy into a Frisian and Clydesdale, you have a problem. The starter bundle is a bit better, for $70 ... still few morphs or skinmaps, but you do get a swag of tack and add-ons. Hmm. I have to decide if I want to go with the DAZ product, or the HiveWire product ... and it's no easy decision to make! So...

The backgrounding for this piece is another 2D resource, one of the 2D/3D backgrounds which are produced by the raft by Sveva, and also available at Renderosity for around $10 per pack. So I took my cue from the 2D background, when I came to design the Iray lights for this one. (He's wearing the Landis Hair for G8.) And the last hurdle to be fallen over was finding a way to make Photoshop brushes work in Krita ... easy answer: they really don't. You can import them, but all the import gives you is the "tip," or raster image from which the brush was created. In other words, if you have about 2,000 .ABR brushes (which I have), you'd have to import the tips into Krita and then make the brush presets for 2,000 brushes. Uh, no. Thanks, but no. Too much work. So, if I'm going to switch to Krita 100% for painting, I need to get the brushes to do it with, right? Right. The hunt is on ... and I think it's going to start here. But not today -- it's so hot! It's 40C in the carport, and the a/c is struggling, so ... signing off for now. 

A tavern, a temple, a spacecraft on approach to an earth-like world...

Again, a grab-bag ... I've been all over the spectrum in images in the last couple of days, and these are the best. Yes, the vampire Amadeus -- and yes, a new set. In fact, you have seen it before, but not in something like eight years! It's the Merlin's Tarven set ... and it's enormous. It's one of those that's detailed inside and outside, and tomorrow I'm going to drive the camera around inside it, and get some shots of the bar, the fireplace, all sorts of fascinating nooks and crannies. It's an amazing set. And Amadeus is lovely, as always. I'll be coming back to him, and he'll meet some of the other characters you've seen in the last six months.

Also...

This makes a gorgeous wallpaper, and it's uploaded at fill size. Help yourself ... you're welcome! This was done in Bryce 7 Pro and Photoshop: dawn breaking over a misty valley and a temple. It's a second visit to an old shot I designed a long, long time ago. This one is better. I jiggled the sun in Bryce till it's juuuust sitting on the skyline there. The sunrays were added in Photoshop (a brush et called Ron's Bokeh Lights. Photoshop brushes are indispensable when you start digitally painting. If not for brushes like these, it'd take hours to do what you can do in seconds. Seriously).

And for good measure, also in Bryce --

This is a blend of two renders in Bryce 7 Pro, with compositing done in Photoshop before I shipped the image out to Krita to paint the starfields. Now --

If all these images belonged to the same story! This is where your imagination runs amok, spinning tales based on a set of images that at first seemed unconnected. Then something clicks, and suddenly a plot is unfolding in your head. I've been playing this game for years.

More soon, hopefully tomorrow. I'll be in the dentist's chair on Friday (ugh), so probably won't be doing anything much after I get through that. It's my least favorite experience and it tends to knock me right off stride for a while. Wish me luck.

Fantasy hunk, SF, landscapes, spaceships -- the works!

Was browsing through the big Icon art book -- the Art of Frank Frazetta -- which put me in the mood to do a "sword and sorcery" style barbarian. This one is a beaut, somewhere between Frazetta and Boris in style, worked in DAZ (just a raytrace; I haven't yet gotten back to LuxRender) and Photoshop (a lot of painting). Very happy with this ... and will come back to the barbarian in days and renders to come. The skin map is superb: Atlas, by SAV, for good old Michael 4. Most of the hair is hand painted, and .. mmm, very happy with the result. Do see it at full size: I uploaded it at 2000 pixels high, so -- enjoy.

Also: more Adventures in Terragen! Been busy in the last couple of days, but didn't upload yesterday due to having a Very Major Migraine in the late afternoon. Right now, am juuust beginning to really drive Terragen, not get taken for a tide by it. For instance...

I wanted an upland meadow, something like the "Heidi" landscape:

Yep, got it! Then, a real, genuine lake in the hills:

No problem! Then, something like the high mountains of Central Asia:

Yep, can do. Then, the sun rising over the Takla Makan region:

Oh, yes, this is doable. Cloudscapes to order? Here we go:

I've worked through two of the tutorials and am off on my own, playing with everything to see what it does. It's huge fun! And Terragen does in minutes what Bryce won't do in weeks. 😁

Okay, so Bryce does have it's uses, though...

Bryce 7 Pro: Exoplanet system

I did this in Bryce, in a few minutes, and painted the starfields in Krita, which has this fantastic "star field" brush. That came out well, so, inspired to stop trying to make Bryce make earthlike landscapes, I went for a thoroughly alien world:

I call that one "Night Patrol," and ... yeah, okay, Bryce has its uses. But making fantastic, realilstic landscapes on planet Earth isn't one of them! A handful of people can make it do that ... heaven alone knows how. Beats me. And very few software forms beat me. Anyway, we have the best of all worlds now. I'm heading into "fractal procedural terrains" with Terragen tomorrow. Oooh, ah!

A hunk, a stag, a stream ... plus Gaussian blur and film grain

CG character design: The Mercenary

The Mercenary -- again. I really like the character, and couldn't resist coming back to him. Wondering about posing him with The Magician ... like, maybe they're in the same place, on the same job? The possibilities are endless and delicious. But --

If there's one thing that "bothers" me about the classic raytrace (which is pretty much where I'm stuck, not being able to outlay several grand on hardware and software at this time, to play catch-up with all the front runners who take Genesis whatever and fabulous render engines for granted...) it's that a raytrace is "too sharp, too clear, too perfect," or something -- an almost indefinable quality that makes even a good picture look fake ... and can make a poorly-rendered character look like a plastic doll, or manikin, perhaps one of those life-like marionettes. The big question being, of course, what can you do about this as a work-around?

So I'm starting to play with film grain and Gaussian blur, to introduce a kind of imperfection to the image, to sort of "knock the edge off the digital perfection," which might fool the eye into seeing a human being instead of a piece of plastic. Here's a detail crop to give a better look at this:

Gaussian blur and film grain added to a CG render

Gaussian blur and film grain were added in Photoshop (I imagine Krita has the filters too, but I confess, I haven't even looked for them yet: am still learning to handle the brushes there). Just enough film grain to knock the edge off the digital perfection ... just enough Gaussian blur to fool your eye into believing a camera took this shot. Raw CG renders with DOF left off are ... just too much in-focus to look real! (This character has also been over-painted with beard shadow, body hair, and a bit of work done on the wind-whipped head-hair ... same reason. The raw model (Michael 4, wearing face and body designed by me) is just too plastic to convince, or please, anyone much today, in the wake of the aforementioned Genesis and fabulous unbiased render engines. (Anybody remember Captain Scarlet and Captain Blue? No, not the more recent digital animation, the 1960s production. Yeah, that one ... did I just date myself??)

Also in this render, I've overdriven the bump maps on everything to heap texture into the shot; the only thing I didn't do was turn on DOF. Technically I should have; but if you just spend twenty minutes over-driving the bump values, then turn on depth of field and the background blurs out, why bother with the bump maps? So in this one I went for texture; in the next one, I'll play with DOF.

Also been painting in Photoshop and Krita. This first one is a digital watercolor done from a photo that was such crap, it belonged in the bin -- but it was the only one where the framing and composition were perfect! So, naturally, the automatic light metering gave me a washed-out photo in pale grays and no real color, and blurred the hell out of it into the bargain. The camera konfooz itself. (My bad: I "cooked" it in a veryveryvery hot car. I think I halfway killed it. Sound of sighing.) So the assignment was, can you take a garbage photo, derive the sketch and wind up with a very nice painting? And the answer is, yes, you can:

Digital watercolor in Photoshop

Please do have a look at that, large size (I uploaded it at 1600 wide) ... am very proud of the fine work. This was produced 90% in Photoshop, with just a tiny bit of painting done in Krita (because it has a brush that Photoshop doesn't; if you have the right .abr brushes in your Photoshop, you could do the whole thing in Photoshop).

Then, this one below is the reverse: 95% done in Krita, with just a little bit of work done in Photoshop for the same reason: a specific brush I wanted to use:

Krita painting: something like oils or acrylic

This one (Stag at Dawn) is much more like a work in oil or acrylic, not at all like watercolor. With the watercolor -- digitally -- you're pouring in layers and layers of semi-opaque "washes" to get a cumulative result. With this one, you're spattering tons of paint onto the digital canvas, all at full opacity, layer after layer of texture to come up with a final result. I'm actually very pleased with this one; but the technique is a lot more time-consuming than the digital watercolor technique. Will save this for projects that either warrant the extra work, or are superbly suited to the process.

The Mercenary ... CG character design, just for fun; and "Summer in the Woods"

Slow, slow days on the run-in to  Christmas, so ... painting to pass the time, and having loads of fun seeing how much I can squeeze out of the old software! I call this one "The Mercenary," and it really is just begging for a story. You might not believe it, but this is the same face I created for the Falconstone book cover a month or two ago! I used a different hairstyle, put beard shadow on him, but that's the same face --

In the background, I used a photo of a fantastic sunrise from February 2017. I just can't remember which of three amazing dawns it was in Feb that year. One, I photographed from the backyard, one from the top of the hill. Now, which is this?!

I have a feeling it's the one from the backyard! In fact, I'm certain of it ... because I recognize those trees in the foreground. Anyway, it provides a very moody and spectacular backdrop for the character here. He looks like he's on an assignment, and the "fun" is about to begin!

Quite a bit of painting went into this shot (chest hair and beard shadow, for one thing ... or is it two?), but the original render is pretty good, too. Just a raytrace, Michael 4 ... not Lux and Genesis or any of that new stuff. Finished off in Photoshop.

But this one, below, was done about 50% in Photoshop and 50% in Krita:

I call this one Summertime. It's a painting from a photo captured at Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens a few years ago. Not a bad photo, in fact, but the painting is better. I'll give you a detail shot, too --

...you really need to see the whole thing at full size -- I uploaded it at 1600 pixels wide, so ... do give it a click and see it big! (Also, the mercenary was uploaded l-a-r-g-e too, so ... enjoy, nudge, wink.

Painting in Photoshop: Wetlands

Painting happily ... passing an image back and forth at will between Photoshop and Krita, but I confess, this one was done 70% in Photoshop, 10% in Irfanview, and then painted up in Krita and passed back to Photoshop to be finished.

What I'm supposed to be doing is training my brain to actually draw inside the software rather than sketching something, then scanning the sketch, reimporting it and coloring it in either or both of those programs. Hmph. No real joy so far. My hand just isn't steady enough, and I'm getting a lot of pain from it ... anyone remember the old condition we used to call RSI years ago, when we typed ourselves into splinted hands and wrists? Same thing. Soooo,

For the moment I'm going to have to suspend the idea of DRAWING because a) my brain can't do it, and b) my hand is screaming with the effort of trying! Instead, we'll go back to painting, not drawing, and let the software do at least some of the work:

I'm pleased with this one. It's from an absoluetely "nothing" snapshot at the Clarendon wetlands about six years go. The light was flat, the colors dismal, rubbish floating in the water. The kind of "meh" photo you never even look at a second time and almost, almost chuck in the bin. But ... the framing and composition were nice, and I do love woodland paintings. For some reason I kept it, and this morning it was handy when I came to scout around for something to paint! First thing I had to do was delete some garbage. This is the beauty of painting: a worthless photo can become a very nice painting indeed.

Just for fun, I'm going to liven this up with some old renders that haven't seen light of day in years and years ... so long, I'd forgotten about them! Have been looking back at some of the old work, and it would be vastly improved with some digital work. Here we go:

I just rebalanced all the colors in this one...
it almost comes up as a whole new work

I call this "Working Class Hero."

More soon ... right now, I have to go soak my right hand in hot water and get some liniment on it!